Conor McGuinness (Waterford, Sinn Fein)

We all welcome this belated move to set up this commission of investigation. We have all heard the stories of family members, friends and constituents and watched documentaries featuring people who had the courage to come forward and tell their stories and, let us be honest, force the Government to set up a means to investigate and somehow reconcile with the past. I hope this commission of investigation will bring healing and acknowledgement and that a measure of justice will be made available to victims of sexual abuse in schools. It is frustrating and hard when every single move has to be fought for. People have to campaign and bare their souls on national media to get any semblance of justice. When other instances of abuse, including physical abuse, that happened on the watch of the State, are looked at, I ask that the State and Government are not so slow to make amendments and take action.

Anybody who listened to Philip Boucher-Hayes's radio show over the past couple of weeks or listened back afterwards will have heard some of the testimonies of people abused and brutalised in schools. I am talking about physical abuse, the thousands of daily violent assaults against children carried out under a veneer of legality due to the corporal punishment rules that existed at the time. It is important that we are clear that the abuse, brutality and assaults that took place - the physical abuse against children by people in positions of power who were supposed to be caring for them - was illegal, criminal behaviour then. It was criminal assault. It was not covered under corporal punishment, as backward and brutal as those rules were. What happened in those schools was far beyond what those intolerable rules allowed. That should not be used as an excuse for the State to duck its responsibilities to those victims. That physical abuse caused real and lasting harm to those children well into their adult lives. I urge the Minister to include, either in this commission of investigation or in a separate commission of investigation, physical abuse in religious-run schools and national schools run by the State with a view to bringing about restitution, acknowledgement and a measure of justice and healing which the people affected also deserve.

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